Arizona -- Fiction; Grand Canyon (Ariz.) -- Fiction; Western stories
A near view of this massive structure was not encouraging; terraces,
turrets, fortifications, castles and above Enoch's head a deep cavern,
out of which the wind rushed with a mighty blast of sound that drowned
the sullen roar of the falls. Beyond a glance in at the black void,
Enoch did not attempt to investigate the cave. He crept past the
opening on a narrow shelf of rock, into a crevice up which he climbed
to the top of the terrace above the cavern. Here a stratum of dull
purple projected horizontally from the black face of the butte. With
his face inward, his breast hard pressed against the rock, hands and
feet feeling carefully for each shift forward, Enoch passed on this
slowly around the sharp western edge of the butte.
Here he nearly lost his balance, for there was a rush of wings close to
the back of his head. He started, then looked up carefully. Far above
him an eagle's nest clung to the lonely rock. The purple stratum
continued its way to a depression wide enough to give Enoch sitting
room. Here he rested for a short moment. The back of the depression
offered an easy assent for two or three hundred feet, to the top of
another terrace along whose broad top Enoch walked comfortably for a
quarter of a mile to the point where the butte projected from the main
canyon wall. The slope here was not too steep to climb and Enoch made
fair speed to the top.
The view here was superb but Enoch gave small heed to this. To his
deep disappointment, there was no sign of life, either animal or
vegetable, as far as his eye could reach. He stood, gun in hand, the
wind tossing his ruddy hair, his great shoulders drooping with
weariness, his keen eyes sweeping the landscape until he became
conscious that the sun was low in the west. With a start, he realized
that dusk must already be peering into the bottom of the Canyon.
Then he bethought himself of the eagle's nest. It was a terrible
climb, before he lay on a ledge peering ever into the guano-stained
structure of sticks from which the eagle soared again at his approach.
As he looked, he laughed. The forequarters of a mountain goat lay in
the nest. Hanging perilously by one hand, Enoch grasped the long,
bloody hair and then, rolling back on to the ledge, he stuffed his loot
into his game bag and started campward.
The way back was swifter but more nerve wracking than the upward climb
had been. By the time he reached the green shale, Enoch was trembling
from muscle and nerve strain. It was purple dusk now, by the river,
with the castellated tops of butte and mountain molten gold in the
evening sun. When he reached the brittle strata, the water reflected
firelight from the still unseen camp blaze. Enoch, clinging perilously
to the breaking rock, half faint with hunger, his fingers numb with the
cold, laughed again, to himself, and said aloud:
"'. . . . . . . . . . . . . And yet
Dauntless the slug horn to my lips I set
And blew, Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came.'"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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